Milan Nedić

Milan Nedić ( sr-Cyrl, Милан Недић; 2 September 1878 – 4 February 1946) was a Yugoslav and Serbian army general and politician who served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Royal Yugoslav Army and minister of war in the Royal Yugoslav Government. During World War II, he collaborated with Nazi Germany and served as the prime minister of the puppet government of National Salvation, in the German occupied territory of Serbia. After the war, the Yugoslav communist authorities imprisoned him, where in 1946, according to the official version, he committed suicide. He was included in the 100 most prominent Serbs list. There have been attempts since the 2000s to present Nedić's role in World War II more positively. All applications to rehabilitate him have so far been declined by the official Serbian courts.

Early life

Milan Nedić was born in the Belgrade suburb of Grocka on 2 September 1878 to Đorđe and Pelagia Nedić. His father was a local district chief and his mother was a teacher from a village near Mount Kosmaj. She was the granddaughter of Nikola Mihailović, who was mentioned in the writings of poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and was an ally of Serbian revolutionary leader Karađorđe. The Nedić family was originally from the village of Zaoka, near Lazarevac. It traced its origins to two brothers, Damjan and Gligorije, who defended the Čokešina Monastery from the Turks during the Serbian Revolution. The family received its name from Nedić's great-grandmother, Neda, who was a member of the Vasojevići tribe from modern-day Montenegro.

Military and political career

Nedić finished gymnasium in Kragujevac in 1895 and entered the lower level of the Military Academy in Belgrade that year. In 1904, he completed the upper level of the academy, then the General Staff preparatory, and was commissioned into the Serbian Army. In 1910, he was promoted to the rank of major. He fought with the Serbian Army during the Balkan Wars, and received multiple decorations for bravery. In 1913, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served with the Serbian Army during World War I and was involved in rearguard actions during its retreat through Albania in the winter of 1915. That year, he was promoted to the rank of colonel. At 38, he was the youngest colonel in the Serbian General Staff. He was appointed ordnance officer to King Peter in 1916. Towards the end of the war, Nedić was given command of an infantry brigade of the Timok Division.

Nedić remained a brigade commander within the Timok Division until the end of 1918 and served as the 3rd Army chief of staff. Beginning in 1919, he also served as the '' de facto'' head of the 4th Army District in Croatia because its nominal commander, General Božidar Janković, was old and infirm. Nedić's cousin, Dimitrije Ljotić, and their mutual friend Stanislav Krakov, also served in the 4th Army District and were commanded by Nedić. When the Royal Yugoslav Army ( sh-Latn, Vojska Kraljevine Jugoslavije, VKJ) was formed in 1919 he was absorbed into the army at the same rank. He was promoted to ''Divizijski đeneral'' in 1923, and subsequently commanded a division then was Secretary-General of the Committee of National Defence. In 1930, Nedić was promoted to the rank of ''Armijski đeneral'', and assumed command of the 3rd Army in Skoplje. Nedić was appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1934, and held this position until the following year, when he became the third member of the Military Council, probably because of his strained relations with the Minister for the Army and Navy, Petar Živković. At the time, British diplomatic staff observed that he was "somewhat slow-thinking and obstinate". On 13 August 1939, Nedić was appointed Minister of the Army and Navy as part of the Cvetković–Maček Agreement. Ljotić later assisted the '' SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' (Reich Security Central Office, RSHA) in establishing contacts with him. He also exploited the connections he had with Nedić to ensure that the banned Zbor-published journal ''Bilten'' (Bulletin) was distributed to members of the VKJ. The journal was published illegally in a military printing house and distributed throughout Yugoslavia by military couriers.

Because of his disapproval of a potential participation in the war against Adolf Hitler's Germany, Nedić was dismissed on 6 November 1940 by Prince Paul. This was most likely out of unease with Nazi Germany's ally, Fascist Italy which at the time harboured the Croatian extreme nationalist Ustashe leader Ante Pavelić in exile in Rome, and because of the rhetoric of some Italian fascists in the past such as the late Gabriele D'Annunzio, who were violently opposed to a Yugoslav state. Prince Paul sympathised with Britain and Greece, but would not bring Yugoslavia into the war at present while Nedić had pressed for Yugoslavia to accept Hitler's offer of having Yugoslavia sign the Tripartite Pact. The prince regent wanted to keep Yugoslavia neutral as he was painfully well aware of the greater military power of the ''Reich'', but did not want an alignment with Germany, which led to clashes with Nedić. Germany had also offered Yugoslavia the province of Greek Macedonia as a reward for signing the Tripartite Pact, which would had given Yugoslavia the city of Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, and access to the Aegean Sea. Paul who was married to a Greek princess rejected the bribe of Greek Macedonia while Nedić had been in favor of accepting the offer. Nedić believed that Germany would win the war and favored having Yugoslavia join the winning side while also being very keen to annex Greek Macedonia. Nedić's viewpoint was Serbian rather than Yugoslav, and his primary concern was to protect Serbia from losing territory to neighbors such as Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy, which he believed could be best achieved with an alliance with Germany. Under the strong German pressure with the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop threatening war if Yugoslavia did not sign the Tripartite Pact, Prince Paul had Yugoslavia sign the pact on 25 March 1941, but he added the proviso that Yugoslavia would not grant transit rights to Germany to invade Greece. Paul's trump card was that though Yugoslavia was poor, but the kingdom was rich in deposits of coal, iron, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, chrome, manganese and bauxite. Germany was Yugoslavia's largest trading partner with 41% of all Yugoslav exports going to the ''Reich'' by 1939 and the mines of Yugoslavia were very important to sustaining the German economy. Hitler preferred to have Yugoslavia as a German ally rather than risk the destruction of Yugoslavia's mines, and he consistently placed much importance on having control of Yugoslavia's mines. Nedić welcomed the coup d'état of March 1941 which deposed the regime that had signed the Tripartite Pact, and commanded the 3rd Army Group in the German-led Axis invasion that followed. The new prime minister, Dušan Simović, thought very highly of Nedić and gave him the command of the 3rd Army Group, saying he was the best general available. Unlike the other Yugoslav generals captured by the Wehrmacht in April 1941, Nedić was not sent to a POW camp in Germany, but instead released to his home in Belgrade.

German-occupied territory of Serbia

Wehrmacht commander Heinrich Danckelmann decided to entrust Nedić with the administration of German-occupied territory of Serbia in order to pacify Serb resistance. After the start of Operation Barbarossa, the main German priority was the war against the Soviet Union, and Nedić's government was created in order to provide indigenous forces to hunt down the guerillas. The three Wehrmacht motorised divisions that had conquered Yugoslavia in April had all been pulled out by June for Operation Barbarossa while the total Wehrmacht forces in Serbia in the summer of 1941 were three second-rate infantry divisions, which were insufficient against guerrilla bands in the mountainous countryside. Danckelmann reported to Berlin that his mission in defending the mines and railroads of Serbia against guerrilla attacks in a highly rugged country full of mountains and mud roads with only three divisions was impossible, and that he needed additional Wehrmacht and SS/police units to put down the rebellion, only to be told that Operation Barbarossa was the main priority and that no additional forces would be sent to Serbia until Barbarossa was finished. Danckelmann's deputy, Harald Turner, suggested raising Serbian forces to put down the rebellion, which in turn required some sort of Serbian government as it was highly unlikely that many Serbs would rally to the defense of the German occupation. To assist with forming a Serb government, the ''Auswärtiges Amt'' (Foreign Office) sent out Edmund Veesenmayer to Belgrade with orders to find a prominent Serb leader who was well respected; could be trusted to deal "ruthlessly" with the guerrillas; and was capable of raising a para-military force, which suggested that someone with a military background was needed to head the puppet government. Veesenmayer selected Nedić under the grounds that he had the necessary military experience to raise para-military forces; was well respected by the Serbs; had an authoritarian personality and leadership style; and finally was fanatically anti-Communist and a great believer in the Nazi "final victory".

Not long before, Nedić had lost his only son and pregnant daughter in law in a munitions explosion in Smederevo, in which several thousands died. He accepted the post of the prime minister in the government called the Government of National Salvation, on 29 August 1941. At the same time mass imprisonment of the Jews started where police and gendarmerie of quisling government under Nedić assisted the Germans in arresting the Jews. The German historian Marie-Jannine Calic wrote that Nedić's ideology was "...a mixture of ultraconservatism and the chauvinism of the fascist Zbor movement, a strange conglomerate of heterogeneous ideological elements creating an ethnic-racist, blood-and-soil cult and religious Orthodox messianism, coupled with a fixation on an age-old Serb patriarchal family structure and village community". Nedić was motivated to collaborate partly by a belief that he could protect the Serbs from the worse effects of the occupation, partly by a belief that Germany was going to win the war and that he could best secure Serbia's place in the "New Order in Europe"; and finally by his belief that Serb society had become "sick" and needed his stern regime to cure it. Nedić did not envision the restoration of Yugoslavia after the war, and instead expected to lead a Serb state. Hitler regarded all Serbs as treacherous and scheming, whom he contemptuously labelled a nation of "bandits", and Nedić was never fully trusted in Berlin. Nedić did not help his cause in Berlin by professing to be still loyal to the House of Karađorđević as he maintained that the teenage King Peter II had been merely misled.

On 1 September 1941 Nedić made a speech on Radio Belgrade in which he declared the intent of his administration to "save the core of the Serbian people" by accepting the occupation of Germany in the area of Šumadija, Drina Valley, Pomoravlje and Banat. He also spoke against organizing resistance to the occupying forces. Unlike the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain in France, which the Germans at least treated as a sovereign state with full diplomatic relations, Nedić's "Government of National Salvation" was not allowed full sovereignty as control of the economy, the financial system, the police and the military always rested in German hands and Germany was not represented by an ambassador in Belgrade. Nedić was also denied any authority over the ''volksdeutsche'' (ethnic Germans) living in Serbia who were organized into a state-within-the-state under direct German control. The two para-military forces that Nedić did control was the Serbian State Guard and the Serbian Volunteer Corps, both of which existed only to assist German forces with hunting down guerillas. Nedić was always unpopular with most Serbs as the urban middle class by and large stayed loyal to King Peter II and his government-in-exile in London while the peasants distrusted his government, which proved incapable of stopping or even reducing the German economic exploitation of Serbia. On 28 August 1941, the prime minister of the government-in-exile, General Dušan Simović gave a speech on the BBC's Serbo-Croatian language station where he claimed that the invasion of Yugoslavia had delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union by five weeks and thus presented Yugoslava's defeat as a sort of victory for the Allies. Nedić responded by giving a speech on Radio Belgrade where he mockingly called Simović "the savior of Bolshevism".

Nedić imposed a strict censorship, created a National Labour Service, and "cleansed" the education system by firing all teachers and university professors suspected of opposing the occupation. Nedić had a strong distrust of intellectuals and he brought in a Serbian Cultural Plan for the "renewal" of Serbia that defined being Serb in racial terms. In common with the other "submerged' nations of Eastern Europe, intellectuals in Serbia had an immense prestige as the guardians of the national culture. Nedić's purge of the educational system, his attacks on intellectuals opposed to his regime, and his attempts to promote intellectuals favorable to his regime was part of a wider effort to redefine what it was to be Serb in a racial-ethnoreligious terms. The centerpiece of his efforts was the Committee for the Protection of Serbian Blood, a group of intellectuals who defined being Serb as being Aryan and Orthodox. His state's propaganda was funded by Germany and promoted anti-Semitism and anti-communism, particularly linking these up with anti-masonry. In his speeches he uses terms such as ''"Communist-Jewish rabble"'' and ''"Communist-Masonic-Jewish-English mafia"''. According to historian Milivoj Bešlin, terms from the categorical apparatus of Nazism "white race", "pure race", "aryanism", etc, was used by Nedić's propaganda, while he strongly advocated protection of the Serbian people from "irregular mixtures". Also in that context, Nedić's government brought regulations for implementing the policy of the occupation authorities about losing the rights to work of Romani and Jewish population. In March 1942, Nedić established the Serbian State Guard (Srpska državna straža) who together with the Gestapo participated in the guarding of the Banjica concentration camp, and were responsible for the killings of inmates, including children. In October 1943, the State Guard came under control of the SS. Its members were also engaged in the execution of captured Partisans.

The puppet government under Nedić accepted many refugees mostly of Serbian descent. The Ustaše regime in Croatia had waged a genocidal campaign against the Prečani Serbs of the Krajina and Bosnia-Herzegovina, leading to thousands of refugees fleeing into Serbia proper, and much of Nedić's time was taken up with trying to provide aid for the refugees. However, Nedić's inability to stop the Ustaše violence against the ''prečani'' Serbs did much to undermine his image in Serbia as he was forced to admit that he had asked the Germans to try to change the mind of the government in Zagreb. The civil war unleashed in the German-occupied territory of Serbia was the cause of the loss of as many or even more lives than German terror. In total, between 141,000 and 167,000 people died in Serbia of war-related causes. These deaths included 34,000 killed by the Germans and their Serb helpers, 46,000 deaths in prisons and camps, and 33,000 Chetnik and 42,000 Partisan combatants. At least 300,000 people were deported from Serbia or held in prisons and concentration camps. German reprisals demanded that 100 Serbs be killed for each killed German soldier and 50 for each wounded German soldier, as in the Kragujevac massacre. By December 1941, the Partisans had been driven out of Serbia following an offensive that saw half-million German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops along with the forces that Nedić had raised committed against them, fleeing into the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Nedić implemented Hitler's anti Semitic policies and Belgrade became the first city in Europe to be declared Judenfrei ("clean of Jews") while Serbia itself was declared as such in August 1942. Nedić also secretly diverted money and arms from his government to the Chetniks. The military forces of Ljotić and Nedić together with the Wehrmacht participated in anti-Communist operations. In the 1942 Christmas address, he announced that "''the old world, which had destroyed our state, is over and replaced by the new one. This new world will elevate Serbia to its rightful and honorable place in the new Europe; under the new leadership (of Germany) we look courageously into the future''". In 1942 he outlined a memo of his vision of Great Serbia in which Bosnia-Herzegovina, Srijem, and Dalmatia are within Serbia's borders with local population replaced by Serbian settlers. On 28 February 1943, the commanding general in Serbia reduced the reprisal orders to 50 hostages for each German soldier, armed forces employee, civilian or Bulgarian soldier killed, and 25 for each German or Bulgarian wounded. Nedić was received by Adolf Hitler in September 1943 when they talked about security and order in the occupied territory, also at that meeting Nedić requested the annexation of East Bosnia, Montenegro, the Sanjak, Kosovo-Metohija and Srem. Joachim von Ribbentrop opposed Nedić’s demands which forced Hitler to appease Nedić by promising him concessions elsewhere. Nedić's Ministry of Education, Ljotić and the intellectuals from the Zbor prepared Serbia and its youth by changing the education system in order to prepare the society for Hitler’s New Europe, in which anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were integral parts of the new ideological framework. About the "great" Adolf Hitler hundreds of texts was written by Nedic's propaganda.

On 4 October 1944, with the successes of the Red Army, Bulgarian Army and Yugoslav Partisans and their combined onslaught on Belgrade, Nedić's puppet government was disbanded, and on 6 October Nedić fled from Belgrade to Kitzbühel, Austria (then annexed to Germany) where he took refuge with the occupying British. On 1 January 1946, the British forces handed him over to the Partisans.

He was incarcerated in Belgrade on charges of treason. On 4 February 1946, it is believed that Nedić either jumped out of the window of the Belgrade hospital where he was being detained or that he was pushed out to his death. According to official records, he committed suicide by jumping through the window. According to the Register of Victims Killed after 12 September 1944, Nedić was "liquidated".

Recently, Miodrag Mladenović, a former officer with the Yugoslavian OZNA, said that on 4 February 1946, he received an order to pick up a dead body at Zmaj Jovina street, where the prison was located at the time. When he arrived there, the body was already wrapped in a blanket and ''rigor mortis'' had already set in. Following the orders given to him, he took the body to the cemetery where it was buried in an unusually deep grave. He never attempted to see the face of the person that he was carrying, but the day after, he read in the news that Nedić had committed suicide by jumping through the prison window at Zmaj Jovina street.

Legacy

In Communist Yugoslavia, Nedić was depicted as a villain until 1985. That year the historian Veselin Đuretić published his book ''Saveznici i Jugoslovenska ratna drama'' (''The Allies and the Yugoslav War Drama''), an account of relations between the "Big Three" allies of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom with the Partisans and the Chetniks. Besides for reversing the usual picture in Yugoslav historiography that had Partisans as the heroes and the Chetniks as the villains, Đuretić also tried to rehabilitate Nedić as a great Serb patriot, which marked the first ever that any book in Communist Yugoslavia had ever presented Nedić in a positive light. During the Miloševic era, the regime and some Serb historians found it extremely important to win over eminent Yugoslav Jewish organizations and individuals for the idea of the joint Serbo-Jewish martyrdom. To accomplish it, regime historians had to falsify history by obscuring the fact that Milan Nedic and Dimitrije Ljotić had cleansed Serbia of its sizeable Jewish population by deportations of Jews to East European concentration camps or killing them in Serbia.

The 1993 book The 100 most prominent Serbs published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts included an entry on Nedić in which its editor, the art historian and its editor Dejan Medaković, claimed that Nedić was "one of the most tragic figures in Serbian history" whose collaboration saved "a million Serbian lives". Patriarch Pavle held a memorial service for Nedić in 1994, during which he justified his collaboration with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was "the only way to save the Serbian people from the revenge of the occupiers".

After 2000, revisionists' demands for the rehabilitation of Milan Nedić began. The minor Serbian Liberal Party attempted to promote his rehabilitation as an anti-Nazi, who did his best in an impossible situation, sparking controversy in Serbia. The publisher of a 2002 secondary school history textbook, Nebojša Jovanović, told the daily ''Politika'' that collaboration with the Nazis was a way of preserving the ‘biological substance of the Serbian people".

Nedić's portrait was included among those of Serbian prime ministers in the building of the Government of Serbia. In 2008, the Minister of Interior and Deputy PM Ivica Dačić removed the portrait after neo-Nazi marches were announced in the country. Revisionist interpretations required that Nedić's collaboration with the occupying forces and responsibility for the execution of Jews under his rule be obscured, in order to remember him as the "savior of the Serbian people".

On 11 July 2018, The Higher Serbian Court in Belgrade rejected an application to rehabilitate the quisling Prime Minister of occupied Serbia during World War II, Milan Nedić. During the rehabilitation trial, historian Bojan Dimitrijevic from the Institute for Contemporary Serbian History claimed, based on archived documents, that Nedić was not directly involved in the persecution and killing of Jews. According to Dimitrijevic, Nedić's administration only registered Jews and gave them fake Serbian documents while the Germans rounded them up and performed all the executions.

Other sources claim that it was Nedić's role to protect Serbs from further executions in NDH and by Germans in Serbia by aiding in the persecution of Jews. Among other things, his regime confiscated and sold the property of Jews after they were executed by Germans, who were not interested in buying the homes and lands of Jews in Serbia.

According to historian and President of the Jewish community in Belgrade, Jaša Almuli, one of the major reasons behind the killing of 11,000 Jews in Serbia by Germans was through reprisals for resistance against Germans in occupied Serbia and that Jews were killed for the same reasons as Serbs: to fulfill Hitler's quota towards Serbs and Serbia: for a wounded soldier to kill 50 and for a dead German soldier to kill 100 people. For that reason, together with Serbs and Gypsies, about 5,000 Jews were shot. German SS General Harald Turner was the main culprit behind the shooting of Jews in occupied Serbia.

According to Philip J. Cohen, in Nedić's Serbia about 15,000 Jews perished or 94% of Serbian Jews. According to Jelena Subotić, 27,000 Jews out of 33,500 in pre-occupied Serbia were killed in the Holocaust, and another 1,000 from central Europe, mostly from Czechoslovakia and Austria. Of the approximately 17,000 Jews who resided in German-occupied Serbia, 82% of them were killed early on, including 11,000 Belgrade Jews.

During the COVID-19 pandemics in 2020, school classes were presented on the Radio Television of Serbia. One lecture for eighth grade students caught attention of the Serbian public. The teacher spoke positively about Milan Nedić and his role in WWII, even though such opinions are not based on the official textbook for the 8th grade. Dubravka Stojanović commented on this lecture and emphasized that the games played with fascism and anti-fascism when it comes to "basic good and evil" brought the society into complete disorientation. She also pointed out that she often warned about the problems of revisionist history and rehabilitation of collaborators from WWII in history textbooks.

Works

*''Srpska vojska i solunska ofanziva'', 1932
*''Kralj Aleksandar Prvi Ujedinitelj: kao vojskovođ'', 1935
*''Srpska vojska na Albanskoj Golgoti'', 1937

Citations

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nedic, Milan
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